Vidjagame Apocalypse 207 – Essential DLC

With at least two of last year’s biggest games getting big-time DLC this week, it seemed like as good a time as any to take a look – with the help of Telltale’s Nathan Ortega – at some of our favorite DLC expansions of all time. More than downloadable extras, these added new stories to amazing games and sometimes even improved the overall experience – and once we’re done getting nostalgic about them, it’s time to talk about Kingdom Hearts, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, Rain World, Narcosis, the Destiny 2 reveal, and your favorite game trilogies of all time.

Question of the Week
What’s the most memorable experience you’ve had trading in a game?

Qotw
In general memory
Playing yugioh for years and arguing about how it works and spending a regretful amount of money on it. I have more specific ones like two of my original Lob exodia pieces being destroyed in a storm. I’m just glad they finally fucked up the game with pendulum monsters so I can quit.

Also I remember entering a toysrus Pokémon card contest and my mom shuffled the deck and put all the energies at the bottom so the game lasted forever but up until that point I hadnt really realized that the game relied on energies and that’s boring so I quit

I don’t trade in many games, due to the terrible turnaround price. But I remember trading in the PS3 version of Skyrim (which came with my system), and buying Persona 4 Arena for a few bucks. Had a lot of fun with this Atlus fighting game/visual novel and was glad I didn’t have to deal with the constant glitchy BS that comes with Bethesda games.

I don’t trade anything in because GameStop is the devil. Fun fact, my town of 110,000 people has 2 GameStop’s, and they’re 200 meter’s from each other. Closest I’ve come to trading something in was getting offered a whopping $0.33 for Twilight Princess. These days if I’m getting rid of games I sell them online like an adult.

QOTW:
Animal Crossing New Leaf consumed three weeks of my life in 2013, to the point where I remember literally nothing else about that period. I knew I had to get rid of it because it was intruding too heavily on the rest of my life. When I traded it in, the cashier was like “Oh man, are you sure?” I said yes. “You’re gonna get to where you miss it and you’ll want to go back!” No I won’t. “Your villagers are going to miss you!” I think I can live with that. “But your relationship values are going to—” I actually had to interrupt him and say yes, I want to trade this in, please stop trying to convince me not to. To this day, I have never missed the game or felt the urge to get it again.

One of my favorite games ever is Digimon World for the ps1. Unfortunately my copy would freeze in a few specific places about 75% of the way through the game. Frustrated I traded it in at a local game shop. About a year later I saw a used copy of Digimon World in EB Games and bought it again. Sure enough, as soon as I get to toy land the game freezes. I test it and it freezes in all the exact spots mine had. Again, I trade it in and buy something else. Fast forward five years, I’ve moved away from my home town and am back visiting. I’m browsing through games and stumble across Digimon World at Game Stop. I buy the game and spend the rest of the trip eager to get home and finally finish this game. I get home, load up my save, head to toy land and lose my shit when the game freezes again. I’d switched consols, I’ve looked online for other people with the same freezes, I’ve deleted the save data and started from scratch all to no avail. The ONLY explanation is that I bought the exact same copy of the game three different times from three different stores. I don’t trade games in anymore and I still don’t have a working copy of Digimon World.

My biggest trade in to Gamestop was in early 2008 when I traded in everything I had for the PS2 for a PC headset, Mass Effect 1, and a pre order of the special edition of Spore and some leftover credit. My trade in was so large that the receipt was nearing five feet long.
Mass Effect ended up not working on my PC at the time and I still own that dumb copy of Spore despite not loving that game as much as my 15 year old brain thought.. I did love that headset and it served me well when I started playing TF2 that summer.

QOTW: This is less about my trade-in experience and more about what happened after. A little backstory: I’ve mentioned in posts before that last year I worked midnight shifts at a hospital and then would student teach at a high school in the morning pursuing my Masters degree. One night, last April, I swung into one of our local Gamestops to take part in a trade-in promotion before heading into work. Trade-in went ok – no big deal. Two days later, during my planning period at the high school, the students who deliver newspapers to all the classrooms show up (yeah, this is still a thing), hand me my copy, and the front page story immediately catches my eye. The night that I was at Gamestop doing a trade-in, someone climbed onto the roof after the store closed, gained access to the inside of the store through a ceiling AC unit, cut the security video feed, and then proceeded to start looting. He tripped a silent alarm, and soon the police, fire dept., and SWAT show up. The looter hid in the ceiling and PRETENDED NOT TO BE THERE even after the police realized he WAS there and even tried to talk to him. He eventually fell through the ceiling, knocking a SWAT officer into the checkout counter, and tried to fight and run before being apprehended. I know this isn’t exactly a trade-in experience per se, but I never go into Gamestop because of their abhorrent trade-in policies and prices and the one time I do, unbelievable stuff like this happens.

Around I think 1998 new sort of pawn shop had opened in my town and the people behind the “Buying” counter had obviously never done a job like that before – they were buying just about anything. To my surprise, a stack of PS1 demo discs and some CDs I didn’t listen to, plus there HAD to have been a couple of actual games, netted me enough money to buy a Gameboy Pocket and I had enough left over for half the cost of Pokemon Red Version. It was awesome.

Until about three weeks later when I was out with my parents at a bar (it’s normal here shut up, I wasn’t drinking) and dropped my Gameboy at the table and smashed the screen. I then sold the smashed Gameboy to a dumb kid at school for $10.

Qotw: While trading in some games at Gamestop, I decided to look through their dwindling PS One used games. I spot a jewel case for Persona 2 that looks imaculate. Keep in mind, this is when PS One games were about to be removed from their stock, and Persona 2 was pretty rare. I pick up the case and head for the counter, and the two guys running the store see what’s in my hand. They literally look at each other, mouths agape, like, “What the fuuuuck?”. One guy digs the game discs out of a drawer and sees that they’re in mint condition. The other guy looks through the computer to see if he can find any more copies in the store, most likely for himself…nope. I walked out of there with what was essentially a new, complete copy of Persona 2 for about $20. The game goes for about $125 now.

QotW: My most memorable trade in experience was sometime soon after FF7 came out for PS One. I was a NES and SNES fanboy from way back, and I was eager to get my hands on a Nintendo 64 after regrettably unloading all of my NES and SNES cartridges (including Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Earthbound, Final Fantasy 3 (aka 6) and a stack of other fantastic games for the 1997 equivalent of $30 . Being a barely pubescent boy, the $30 (or whatever) was all I had, and I needed my Mom to aid in my acquisition of Mario 64 and the console to play it on. I was at a Gamestop, and the guy working there asked me if I was sure I wanted a Nintendo 64, implying the PS1 was the way to go. My indecision left me stunned, and the salesperson’s strange sales tactics pierced deep into my psyche and had me leaving the store empty handed (I think he got commission for confusing would-be customers). Fast forward a few months to sometime after my Mom got her tax return, and we were in a Gamestop in another nearby city looking for a PS1 and a copy of Final Fantasy 7. I didn’t have enough to get it, and the sticker price was out of my or my Mother’s price ranges (bless her heart for her diligence to making her son happy and enabling his crippling video game addiction). Cooincidentally, there was a man in the store trying to sell his PS1 and a random ass game called Codename Tenka. He didn’t want the 1997 equivalent of $50 that Gamestop was trying to give him, so he walked outside, and my Mom followed him to make a black market deal involving only money (that’s my mother we’re talking about ass-hats). She got the PS1 from the guy along with Codename Tenka, and she went back in to pick up the FF7 for me. I was on “Cloud” 9. I stayed up all hours of the night playing the shit out of that game. I even beat Codename Tenka later that year. I still own both games and the PS1 cuz fuck Gamestop.

QOTW: First time commenter. I used to work for a UK equivalent Gamestop, Gamestation. As a job I held down to help me through university, when my course finished I handed in my notice as I would graduating in a couple of months and moving away. My manager at the time decided that he would mess up my pay for my last month so I missed out on £200, knowing I was moving back to the other side of the country and would be unlikely to chase him for it. I was so angry I stole 20 preowned DS carts from his office and took them with me when I moved. I then proceeded to aquire empty boxes from random stores until I had them all. I then sold them back to my nearest Gamestation to make my wages back. I wish I could say this was the most desperate thing I’ve done when hard up for money, but my story of writing SEO for an escort agency based above a Morroccan restaurant opposite a fire station will have to wait for another time.

You guys have Gamestop, while those of us in the UK have GAME. They’re more or less the same thing, right down to the shitty prices and brushes with bankruptcy. Back in 2004 they ran one of the most ill-conceived trade-in schemes over the Summer – trade in ANY 4 PS2 or Xbox games and get a new game for 99p.

They didn’t put any other restrictions on the deal, so you could pick up the four cheapest games from the shelf, pay for them and immediately trade them back in for a new release without breaking £10, as many times as you wanted over the course of two weeks. I remember getting Xbox Live starter kits, Disgaea, Project Zero (Fatal Frame) and tons more from the deal, and if you didn’t like a game you could always use the 10 day return policy to get another, no questions asked. Looking back I’m surprised they’re still open at all.

They ran the same deal once more, only excluding launch titles and sports games, I bet their warehouse looks like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only with crates of Oni, Aqua Aqua and FIFA 2002 instead of the Ark of the Covenant.

QOTW: During the fall of 1996 my local Toys R Us had a promotion to turn in games and systems to pay towards a new Nintendo 64. At this time my brother (16 yrs old) and I (13 yrs old) only had a Sega Genesis and a couple of games so we traded it all in towards the new Nintendo console. With the store credit we were still short on cash so had to wait till early December so our parents could get it as an early Christmas gift. Being the younger of the two I pleaded that the first game we should get is Mario 64. My brother took it into consideration after not really seeing much in games that he liked so Mario won out. As I was out with my parents to visit family my brother was tasked with picking up the console and game after his part time job. When I returned home I was excited to see the console box on the table and then horrified to see that he did not purchase Mario 64 as discussed but Killer Instinct Gold instead. I asked was Mario not available and he mentioned they had it in stock but the box art on the back looked cooler for Killer Instinct. For months this was the only game we had to play other than rentals from the local video store. This was not the last time my brother unintentionally tortured me. Four years later he gifted me Superman 64 since he knew I watched the animated show and once again it looked cool on the back of the box.

QOTW – Hi VGA! My most memorable trade-in experience was back in ’05 when my two brothers and I worked together to get the soon-to-be-launching Xbox 360 for cheap. You see, back in those days up in ye ol’ Winnipeg o’ Canada, deals were actually pretty good for trading in, especially since Blockbuster and Rogers Video, its main competitor, were still alive and kicking, which gave us ample opportunity to get a good deal at EB Games. This especially came to light when EB had a deal where ANY Gamecube, Xbox or PS2 game being traded in towards the upcoming Xbox 360 console was worth either $10 or $20, as long as the game was in good condition and came with case and manual. “$10 or $20?” I said to myself. “That can’t be right.” So I went and tested it out by picking up the cheapest game I could buy, which was ESPN National Hockey Night for 79 cents. “What the hell?” the EB employee said after I came in with the game? “Konami made an NHL game?” They did indeed, and somehow it made it up to $20 when traded in.

I realized that Blockbuster also had its own deal on, where they were selling three games for $10. These were mostly NFL, NHL and NBA games from 2000-2003. Looking at this, along with every copy ever printed of Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter (sidenote: not a bad game). My brothers and I made a decision to go around all of the Blockbusters for that day and buy as many unique versions of each game as possible. We made a rule that games bought could only be done once for each console (ie can buy 3 copies total of NFL 2K2, one for each console).

After our shopping endeavour, we went back home and my oldest brother and I Goo-Gone’d the crap out of the games while the other one played Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter (again, not a terrible game), then played each for about 5 minutes to make sure they worked and for kicks, then went and traded them in the bext day.

All told, we each spent $60 and traded in a total 44 games (some already owned bepfrehand) and 2 controllers (1 Gamecube and 1 Xbox). This netted us a Premium Xbox 360 with Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark Zero, the latter I immediately regretted and traded in afterwards for Call of Duty 2.

All in all, even with the awesome cost savings, more than anything it turned out to be a fun couple of days with my brothers that made us feel like we were getting away like bandits.

Anyways, as a Canadian I must apologize, so sworry for the long post and thank you for everything you do keep this show and all of the other shows on the Lasertime Network amazing! I’m going to go eat some poutine right now and maybe have a Caesar or a Timbit.